August 27, 2020
Dear St. Louis Families,
I wanted to share an update about the technology updates we initiated in July in order to allow us to stream live instruction and make necessary changes to our processes according to state directives.
Connectivity
Cox Cable has had us on the calendar since July 7th for an expansion to our upload/download speeds and connectivity which would give us the capacity to stream live instruction. It has taken weeks but we finally are moving forward on the project. The site visit happened Wednesday and once the project is released, work will take 18 days. We will not be able to teach every class concurrently as we anticipated at the start of school. That is okay. There is much work to do regarding establishing classroom and school procedures, getting to know teachers and new friends, and completing assessments in order to establish a baseline for learning. The teachers have spent a lot of the summer as well as these past two weeks getting ready for students to return to the building and learning new strategies for distance learning as well as becoming comfortable with the digital tools we have. There is a learning curve here for everyone, and we are embracing it along with you, our school families. We will be starting off slowly with asynchronous videos and instructional lessons as well as independent work. Teachers will engage in small group sessions via Zoom or Google Meets with virtual students--we are in the process of creating a schedule for all classroom teachers to work in real time with these smaller groups of virtual students and will begin to introduce to the students some live instruction over the next weeks as our current internet and network allow. Cox Cable has assured us the project should be completed by the end of September. During orientation, teachers will share class schedules with students, but we know it will take some time for students to become accustomed to the schedules as they are different from past experiences. We ask for your patience and flexibility as we are all navigating the rapid changes to instruction together.
SchoolPass
SchoolPass is also something new that we initiated back at the beginning of July, and with the high demand, it is in process but taking time for data integration to occur between the application and our SIS PowerSchool. We had hoped this would be available for our orientation week, but it is not. Once we receive the green light from the company, we will share a brief welcome letter which will be followed by more detailed access information from the SchoolPass company directly. Please do not download the app as it complicates the data integration process—the company has asked us to have families wait until they give the approval to keep moving forward. In the meantime, students will need to complete a health screening questionnaire on the day they come to school prior to their arrival next week. That questionnaire will be shared with parents prior to next week.
Please know these are circumstances out of our control, and while we began them in plenty of time, the pandemic has wreaked havoc with timelines and delivery. Despite these two setbacks, the teachers and administration are eager to have students back in our classrooms. We are ready and excited! This is indeed a year for focusing on our school wide virtue of Charity! As a community, we are being asked to look deep inside and find grace and latitude as we seek to make our school a better place and our students better learners.
Thank you all for your ongoing and continued support of our mission.
Peace,
Anne Dyke
Principal
